These false-color images of Kuiper Belt objects now occupy a place in history Never before have images been captured as far from Earth as these

The NASA spacecraft that gave us close-ups of Pluto has set a record for the farthest photos ever taken.

Voyager 1's cameras were turned off shortly after that portrait, leaving its distance record unchallenged for more than 27 years. "And now, we've been able to make images farther from Earth than any spacecraft in history". Now, it's reportedly snapped the farthest photo from Earth that's ever been taken. In a span of just a few hours on December 5, the craft trained its camera first on the glittering "Wishing Well" star cluster (seen below) and then on two objects in the Kuiper Belt (seen above), the huge band of rocks and dwarf planets that rings the outer fringes of our solar system.

That picture was part of a composite of 60 images looking back at the solar system, on February 14, 1990, when Voyager was 6.06 billion km from Earth. About two hours later, New Horizons later broke the record again.

"New Horizons has always been a mission of firsts-first to explore Pluto, first to explore the Kuiper Belt, fastest spacecraft ever launched", said Principal Investigator Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado.

Launched in 2006, the piano-sized spacecraft made worldwide headlines in 2015, when it made a flyby of one of its principal subjects of investigation: Pluto. Two hours later, he pulled even more distant pictures of the two KBOs.

"Scientists can now see craters and regions of dark-reddish ground". "The spacecraft also is making almost continuous measurements of the plasma, dust and neutral-gas environment along its path".

On December 9, 2017, it carried out the most-distant course-correction manoeuver ever, as the mission team guided the spacecraft toward a close encounter with a KBO named 2014 MU69 on January 1, 2019.

But the New Horizons photos are a worthwhile reminder that as technology improves, and as NASA probes and crafts work their way deeper and deeper into space, there's going to be a wealth of interesting, engrossing, and handsome photos as a result.